… Swing Left’s mission of identifying 78 swing districts, 23 of which would have to be flipped in order to return the Democrats to power in the House, has found a receptive audience. The group has more than 400,000 members and has raised more than $9 million in donations so far.
Over the past year, Swing Left has drawn unsettled Democrats across the country, including a number of so-called influencers, to its ranks, even as more well-funded groups have entered the fray, including the one recently started by Michael R. Bloomberg and Tech for Campaigns, a volunteer network consisting of more than 4,500 tech workers at companies like Google, Facebook and Netflix. And it’s reinforced the notion, illustrated most starkly by the 2016 presidential election, that the traditional ways of running a campaign are increasingly irrelevant. …
In many ways Swing Left is modeled less on a political organization than on a Silicon Valley start-up. Its founders saw a need for a product — one that allowed people to easily identify their nearest swing district by simply typing in their ZIP code and seeing what nearby races they might want to get involved in. CONT.
Sridhar Pappu, New York Times